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After listening to the latest season of the podcast You Must Remember This, which featured Jane Fonda, my wife and I thought it would be kind of neat to go through Fonda’s filmography. We started with her first real movie role on Walk on the Wild Side and after a few more films, arrived at…

Barbarella
This is one strange film.
So strange that I had to stop.
And feel terrible…

After half an hour, I’d had enough. A sexploitation film in every way, though I think what bothered me more than anything was that Fonda seemed 100% committed to the campy role with absolute seriousness. There’s something eerie about the juxtaposition. Not recommended.

Now for the rest — I’ve been meaning to see some of these movies for quite a while; we’re talking years for all but the newest (Alien: Covenant). I had some time last week, so it was a great joy to finally catch up to them.

Not what I expected. I mean I’d heard this was a horror movie set in space, in the vein of Alien, but I did not know how much Clive Barker influence it had (he was consulted, even, during pre-production). Laurence Fishburne was so young and thin! Recommended.

Alien: Covenant
I’ve seen this before
in Star Trek’s Data and Lore
with much less drooling.

I liked Prometheus better than this one. Not a bad movie, and Michael Fassbender is wonderful as always, but sadly predictable in just about every way. My favorite moment of the film was when Amy Seimetz, who plays Faris (and wife of Danny McBride’s Tennessee), in her dash to escape the alien, bangs her shoulder against a metal box in the hallway. It seemed so utterly real, her panic. Barely recommended.

Wow, is the acting bad in this film. Helmed by Paul Verhoeven, who also directed Total Recall and Basic Instinct, you’d think that he’d know how to get a half-decent performances out of his young actors, but no, the leads are uniformly terrible, even Neal Patrick Harris. I couldn’t quite figure this movie out — it’s made to resemble a propaganda film, I guess to satirize the obvious fascism/Nazism imagery, but it almost seems like it’s celebrating it? It’s weird. And really bad, and not in a good way. Not recommended.

Craig Bierko is the lead in this film, but Vincent D’Onofrio, as always, steals every scene he’s in. I think everyone who knows movies knows about D’Onofrio, but he’s one of these actors that I wish was a household name. Four actors play dual parts in this movie, but D’Onofrio is the only one who really seems like two completely different people. There’s a twist in this movie that’s quite ingenious; I wish they went even farther with it, but I’ll take what I can get. Recommended.